


the melon thief

by stickpenalties



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror (kind of), F/F, Family Fluff, Lesbians in Space, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 20:17:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19731025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickpenalties/pseuds/stickpenalties
Summary: An angel is sent to punish a thief. It doesn't go as planned.





	the melon thief

**Author's Note:**

> this was a tiny idea I had on my way home from work today that kind of blossomed into its own whole thing. enjoy!
> 
> cn: rotting food, mention of pregnancy/birth

## 1\. the market

The angel Mellotron was only a minor functionary, and she had been assigned an accordingly minor smiting: a young woman in the Pleiades had stolen a shipment of melons. This would have passed entirely beneath the authorities’ notice in most jurisdictions, but the Red Roach believed in punishing early and punishing often.

Erica was the woman’s name, and according to her idfile she had hair the color of roses and only three fingers on her left hand. Mellotron had never seen a rose, but she excelled at counting.

Mellotron hovered above the open-air marketplace and scanned the crowd with a few dozen of her tiny skin-lenses. No one on the ground paid her any mind. Eventually, she spotted her quarry: near the perimeter of the market, a three-fingered left hand took a packet of salt from a customer while its four-fingered opposite gave them a portion of tender orange melonflesh in a bread cup. Plasma lamps hung above the aisles of the market on wind-jostled wires, and even from this distance, Mellotron could see their blue-cast reflection in the melon’s wet meat. Three of her four mouths began to water.

She floated closer to Erica’s stall. Accumulated power whined and clicked in the palm of her hand, building until it became audible over the commotion below.

She waited patiently for a moment when no innocent bystanders would be harmed, and when it finally arrived, she smote the thief with a roaring jet of divine flame.

But evidently Mellotron’s heart wasn’t in her work that day, because when the white flash faded, the stall looked much the same as it did before, only slightly singed and tattered, and so did its occupant.

~

Erica was getting ready to pack up for the night when she found herself consumed by fire. Or rather, the fire danced all around her, but by the time she realized what was happening, it had begun to fade, and as it rolled off her skin and dissipated against the cobblestones, she was unpleasantly warm, but not in very much pain.

A repulsive but sweet scent pervaded the air. The fruits on display had rotted instead of burning. The sliced ones sank and began to meld with the wooden table; the whole ones crumpled in on themselves as their insides liquefied.

Erica stepped out into the aisle to get away from the smell, and a shadow crossed her vision.

She looked up and saw an angel with skin like a desert night sky, deep bluish-black speckled with dozens of tiny glittering lights. Her black hair fell in tight curls to just past her shoulders, where a faint pair of rainbow lines gave away the outline of a shimmersuit, a translucent force barrier that prevented the strands from getting caught in the skin-covered plates and gears that made up most of her body. She had many mouths and no eyes. Even so, Erica felt watched, and as she took another step toward the angel she realized that the bright spots on her body were camera lenses _reflecting_ light, not emitting it, and most of them were aimed at her. The plasma lights closest to the angel were dimmer in her presence, as if energy itself cowered before her.

“Are you going to set me on fire again?” Erica asked.

~

Mellotron had never been asked a question before.

She floated closer and closer to the fruit seller, until there was barely one body’s worth of empty air between them, and then she let her bare feet touch the ground for the first time.

## 2\. the beach

A decade later, their first child grew old enough to hear the story of how they met. Little Anvandyne sat on Mellotron’s lap, fish popsicle melting in her hand under the summer suns, and Erica told her the tale, drawing a crude map of the marketplace in the sand with three graceful fingers in the beginning. Erica smiled a wicked smile as she approached the end, and Mellotron stuck her tongues out at her because she knew what was coming.

Erica must have told the story close to a hundred times by then. She’d told it at their wedding, the events tumbling out of order from her nervous lips underneath her pink veil. She’d told it at their cruiser-bonding, whispering a more practiced version of it to a brushed metal panel on the bridge of the ship that would take them back to the stars as a family. She’d told it to the nurses when Anvandyne was almost ready to come out of her, soothing herself with its familiar cadence, repeating it through gritted teeth like a ritual.

That day at the beach she told it with broad gestures, interrupted by the occasional sneeze as unfiltered sunlight reflected into her eyes off the water. “And then, boom!” she said, vigorously swiping her hand over the triangle representing her fruit stall, obliterating it and sending a shower of sand grains into the air.

Anvandyne shrieked with glee and bounced up and down on Mellotron’s lap.

“Most of my fruit was gone,” Erica continued, omitting the details, “but when the smoke cleared, there was Mel. My angel.”

Mellotron felt her face heating up. The cooling vents on her neck opened a couple degrees wider with a soft pneumatic hiss.

“I think I knew right away that we were going to be together for a long time.” Erica reached out and intertwined her sandy fingers with Mellotron’s clean ones. “I guess you could say it was love at first smite.”

Mellotron groaned as Erica laughed. The combination of sounds was familiar. Anvandyne was too young to understand why it was funny, but she laughed too, joining her mothers in their collaborative noise-making. The crabs in the sand sang along in their own way.


End file.
